


descent

by between-yourself-and-me (windrattlestheblinds)



Category: Splintered - A. G. Howard
Genre: Alternate Character Interpretation, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 17:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11673459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windrattlestheblinds/pseuds/between-yourself-and-me
Summary: She’s an eternal part of me. I can accept it because she did have a heart once. A heart that felt similar losses to mine: the absence of a mother she adored; the fear of losing her father’s admiration; the regret of a mistake so monumental, it cost her the love of her life.





	descent

Ten years is no age for losing mothers: as the Red Court mourns its queen the princess, still almost a child, feels a keener grief. It cuts her to the bone, to something deeper than bone, and she is left clutching iron bars and heedless of the pain as the Twids steal her mother away forever. She’s pried from the garden gates before the metal’s poison overwhelms her.

_The first time you wished for death._

And the world turns, life marches on. A father unable to look his daughter in the face _(so like her mother’s)_ marries again, this time to a pliant female puppet to play at being queen until the true heir can rise to take her place. This new wife has a daughter, Grenadine, of such delicate beauty and fragile mind that Red’s father cannot help but dote upon her in his every waking hour; this is a fact not lost on Red—he is weak, her father, a man unable to set his shoulders against grief and endure. This new child is a distraction he needs, and she is stronger than him.

_You never wanted to be stronger._

She plants amaranths on her mother’s grave: a promise. Amaranth unfading, amaranth undying, amaranth untainted by the silken sting of the Sisters. One day, there will be no need for these gardens of death.

_Somewhere deep inside, you screamed._

Grenadine though useless is sweet as roses, and Red cannot help falling for her little by little. Kindness tempered by the endless patience of a mind that cannot hold memories for more than a moment, and a willingness to listen when Red purges herself of the rage she is denied by everyone else—these are her stepsister’s virtues. “It is not fair,” Red screams more times than she can count, and each time Grenadine whispers in return “No, it isn’t.”

_Dear sister. Dear, sweet sister._

And this is not enough, because _still_ her father will not face her. _Still_ he will not take tea in her presence. _Still_ he will not speak of her mother and _oh,_ how _badly_ Red needs him to. She has forgotten the color of his eyes and the light of his smile, these things faded like the memory of her mother’s embrace and _it is not fair_ that one parent’s death should deprive her of the other’s affection.

“I love you,” Grenadine whispers, often, sometimes a dozen times in a row before Red tells her she has said it already; but this is not enough.

_When did it happen that you never stopped thinking of death?_

She gardens. Flowers are simple creatures, content when fed and watered and made much of, cantankerous when overlooked; Red is a fastidious caretaker and they adore her for it. Rose and amaranth. Amaranth and rose. Sometimes she rolls her sleeves past her elbows and thrusts bared forearms deep into the rosebushes; petal-soft tongues lap her freckled skin clean of blood after, and the garden croons in shared rapture over the feast.

Good soil feels right under her fingers, soft warm not quite damp. How it breaks apart as easy as it clumps together, how it yields to her touch, how it clings under her fingernails like it can’t bear to release her, how it breathes out the bracing scent of new life.

Happiness might find her here, hands deep in soil while her flowers murmur drowsily among themselves and the sun simmers overhead, tickling a neck that will be burnt purple by evening, a steady life-giving warmth to counter the blistering helpless furnace of her fury— _yes,_ she might be happy in this garden, if only she had time to stay.

_This is a lie; you have never and will never be happy._

And the world turns, life marches on. Red is sixteen when her father begins to court suitors on her behalf: dull men, cruel men, men too arrogant to put their cleverness to use; shy men stuttering over her beauty and beautiful men examining her like they might a prize horse; scholars, soldiers, aristocrats, even—in desperation—a handful of servants. She detests each one, for reasons she can never articulate.

“But you must wed,” her father says, not looking at her. “You must…”

And always, always, she replies, “Not him.”

Children sit at the forefront of his mind. With no other heirs in the bloodline, it is imperative that Red bear children of her own. But she will not marry solely to reassure him that her reign will not be followed by a bloody war of succession. “Mother married for love,” she wants to remind him. “As will I.”

The words balance on her tongue, never to fall.

 _It was not fair. It_ is _not fair._

It is ten years since her mother’s death, and Red grown into a young woman any parent who cared to look would be proud of: she is well-spoken and polite, beautiful but with thorns aplenty and the strength of a queen in her heart. The terrible rage that once burned hot enough to crack and blacken her skin has been tempered to a fury of another sort; when she loses herself to anger now, it is frost creeping over flowerbeds in the night, sharp controlled precise.

“Red,” Grenadine whispers as they stand together in the antechamber to the throne room. In a few minutes she will be coronated, and a few minutes after that she will step into the fire with her new husband.

“Grenadine.”

“Dear sister—relax your jaw.” Grenadine has fingers like padded silk, plumped and softened by an easy life; the whispering ribbons keeping her memories safe tickle as she brushes her thumb against Red’s cheek. “You’ll break a tooth.”

It is an effort to comply. Tonight, Red becomes the queen. Tonight, she will take up a legacy muddled by her father’s weakness and by the dithering idiocy of her stepmother, and she will make it anew. Queens should not, perhaps, feel anxiety writhing so poisonously in their bellies—but Red is not quite a queen.

Not yet.

She lifts her chin and says, “I’m ready.”

And Grenadine, sweet Grenadine, squeezes her hand and whispers, “You’ll be a magnificent queen, dear sister.”

_Your hands shook and your heart felt like stone, leaden and dead in your chest._

Something dies within her on her wedding day; she feels it like the tortured crack of stone, the snapping of rotten ice. Finvarra is a kind man, gentle and compassionate, but when she takes his hand and leads him into the fire, when their wedding clothes burn away and they press naked against each other, when she feels him inside of her and grits her teeth and lifts her eyes to the brilliant red-gold sky and waits for it to end—

Then.

Then.

_Then._

_You cared for him but his touch tore open your soul and left you bleeding._

He speaks endlessly of children. He pleads. He cajoles. He sulks. At night his hands wander; at night she wakes up with him shaking and needy between her legs. When he touches her she goes _somewhere else,_ and each time what comes back is a little bit less.

Red devotes herself to matters of state, to a delicious if halting dance of peace with the Queen of the Ivory Court; when she cannot lose herself in ruling her country, she buries herself in roses and amaranth, in thoughts long since laid aside of breaking down the gates of death.

_This, you remember; this, you could not burn from your skull no matter how you tried._

Eventually, she flees for hours and then for days at a time to the world above. Cloaked in a human façade, she can blend into a crowd, become _nobody at all,_ and anonymity is the sweetest relief she has ever tasted.

She is wearing the form of a human woman, a governess, when she first crosses paths with Charles Dodgson; he sits for hours with the children in her care inventing tales for them— _with_ them—and Red, disguised as their caretaker, listens enthralled as the children while he speaks. His smile is shy, his voice soft, his eyes kind and alight with a childish wonder; he is quite unlike any man she has ever met.

After the children return from a boating trip giggling and telling tales of Wonderland, Red resolves to pay him special attention. The Wonderland of his tale isn’t the Wonderland she knows; it is something rich and marvelous, and it awakens in her a depth of longing she hadn’t known possible.

_Finally you uncovered the terrible truth, and understood what you had to do._

And then.

It’s Grenadine who alerts her to the straying of Finvarra’s heart—sweet Grenadine, sick with guilt and grief, with her whispering ribbons echoing his seductive overtures for Red to hear. She feels a dull fluttering of anger that he would drag the coldness of their marriage into the open, that he would seek to entangle _Grenadine_ of all people in his vengeance; she embraces her sister and tries not to think that his unfaithfulness might grant her some reprieve.

“It isn’t your fault,” she whispers; what she means to say is, “I won’t drag you into this.”

_How long did your promise last? A month? Two?_

When she was younger, it was a vindictive trick, a game to catch her father’s attention; the twist of her fingers and flicker of magic and the silken, whispering ribbons slipping into her palm. Now it’s an act of despair and sacrifice—a betrayal deeper than words.

Grenadine’s ribbons squirm in her grip. They whisper: _Keep Red’s husband from your heart. She is your sister, a love that’s precious. Always be faithful…_

She steals dozens of them, knowing that sooner or later Grenadine will give up wearing them—and then she will fall for Finvarra and steal him away, and Red will let him slip easily through her fingers.

And the world turns, time marches on; everyone in the Red Court knows of the king’s infidelity—of Red’s failure to keep him happy in marriage, of her failure to bear him the children he craves, of her cruelty and her negligence and her growing obsession with the human world. She lets it happen. She has long since ceased to care for anything but the revitalization of Wonderland, the restoration of dreams to her people, and she knows the sacrifices she must make to see it to fruition.

But Grenadine—

_Some things—some things cannot be forgiven._

She drinks to forget.

**Author's Note:**

> i've never been entirely on board with red as a cartoonishly evil villain. if we set her mustache-twirlingly bad dialogue, she strikes me as really more of a well-intentioned extremist: she wants to bring dreams to wonderland (a goal she shares with Our Heroes!) but is angry, bitter, and hurt by the injustices of her past—and willing to make some pretty appalling sacrifices to achieve her goals.
> 
> chapter two of _ensnared,_ in particular, has always seemed disingenuous to me here's a girl whose father neglects her after her mother's death, a woman whose husband spends months openly pursuing her sister because she doesn't want children... and we're meant to hate her for this? 
> 
> as i see it, the only thing red did wrong in this series of memories was stealing grenadine's ribbons—and _that_ was wrong because it opened the door for the king to take advantage of grenadine's memory loss, _not_ because it indirectly led to the king's infidelity.
> 
> thus this is a sort of exploratory remix of her repudiated memories, trying to tease out some of the depth that is _there_ in canon but glossed over by alyssa's / the narrative's simplistic interpretation of her motivations.
> 
> a part two concerning her plans for alice liddell and wonderland's future _might_ happen eventually, but i wouldn't count on it.


End file.
